The Six-Figure Travel Writer

I say this a lot. And a lot of you are already very aware of without me having to mention it, but…

The kind of writing that flies on blogs is *very* different than what appears in print magazines.

The perennial question, however, is how?

In many ways, the way people (editors, namely) talk about this different calls to mind the famous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

And when we dig into it, the simple fact of the matter is that a lot of the “trip report”-style pieces they write for themselves are far too “kitchen sink” to appear in a print publication.

They don’t have an angle, they don’t necessarily even have a thesis (a.k.a. a reason the reader can underestand why their eyeballs are still attached to you story rather than the billions of other pieces on content on the internet, and they usually don’t even have an underlying flow that pulls the reader through the piece.

So why on earth do these “trip report”- or “diary”-style pieces also appear in magazines if they’re so picky and obsessed with angles and brevity and trends and other hot new things?

You can see these types of pieces you might see in newspapers, on BBCTravel.com, and even in the feature wells of major magazines.

And when they’re out there, in “respectable” publications, these kind of pieces make people say, “What gives? How come this person gets to write about their trip for The Dallas Morning News/BBCTravel.com/AFAR??!? I write the same kind of stuff on my blog!”

This is actually the reason that I saved our Article Nuts and Bolts webinar on this very ubiquitous article type for the end of our month on features.

Diary-style pieces are like cooking. People do them everyday, sometimes just for friends or relatives in a casual setting, and sometimes on a professional but not super demanding scale, but only a handful of chefs or “white hats” have earned the intangible seal of approval to do them as a consummate professional.

In our Article Nuts and Bolts: How to Put Together a Diary Piece webinar on a special date and time this Monday, April 30, at 6:00pm EST / 3:00pm PST before the week of festivities for the Women in Travel Summit in Quebec City kicks off, we’ll explore the correct way to put together these pieces for the level of expectation of a print publication editor.

A staple of websites and newspapers (yes!) these pieces are easy to do badly, so learn how to do them easily as they’re a quick type of article. Register here to get the call-in information to join us live, along with the link to catch the replay for same-day viewing the rest of the day following the live webinar.

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Thanks for visiting! If you liked what you read here and want to share it, please use the social handles above for attribution or reach out to us about using our travel writing lessons in your courses, curricula, e-books or blogs. All text copyright Dream of Travel Writing and Gabi Logan, 2016 - 2018.